Join the Developmental Psychology area for a talk by Amy Margolis (The Ohio State University)!
Title: The Role of Environmental Chemicals and Social Stressors in the Etiology of Learning Difficulties
Abstract: Children from economically disadvantaged communities have a disproportionate risk of exposure to chemicals, social stress, and learning difficulties. Although animal models and epidemiologic studies link chemical exposures and risk for adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes, little focus has been paid to academic outcomes in environmental health studies. Similarly, in the educational literature, environmental chemical exposures are overlooked as potential etiologic factors in learning and attention difficulties. This talk will present evidence from longitudinal, prospective birth cohort studies that support this theory of environmentally-associated phenotypes of learning and attention difficulties. Data reviewed point to the effects of prenatal exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), one class of neurotoxic air pollutant, on reading and math skills via cognitive and neural processes. Long term, this work may help close the achievement gap in the United States by identifying behavioral and neural pathways from prenatal exposures to learning and attention difficulties in children from economically disadvantaged families, an understudied group at highest risk.
About Amy Margolis: Dr. Amy Margolis is the S.T.A.R (Stress, Trauma, Adversity, and Resilience) Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at The Ohio State University (OSU) and Head of Strategy for the Learning and Development Research Innovation Center at the Child Mind Institute. She is a licensed psychologist with 25 years of experience assessing and treating children with neurodevelopmental disorders. She directs the Environment, Brain, and Behavior Lab and serves as Director of Neurophenotyping in the Center for Neuroimaging, Neurophenotyping, Neuromodulation, and Neurocomputation (C4N) as well as Director of Investigator Career Development for the OSU Clinical and Translational Science Institute. Dr. Margolis is principal investigator of numerous federally funded research projects that use neuroimaging to understand the effects of prenatal chemical exposures on neurodevelopment, with a specific focus on learning problems. She served as text reviser for the DSM-VTR Chapter on Specific Learning Disorders and as Co-Chair of the neurodevelopment working group for the Environmental influences on Children’s Health Outcomes (ECHO) program.
The Developmental Seminar Series area features both internal and external speakers who are experts in a wide range of topics including the development of cognition, perception, learning, emotional processing, and social relationships.
For more information, contact Developmental Psychology area coordinator Zeynep Saygin.